By Bob Hennelly 

New York City public sector unions are blasting Mayor Eric Adams’ mid-year budget cuts aimed at closing a $7 billion dollar budget gap Hizzoner says was created by a confluence of addressing the migrant crisis, the ending of federal COVID aid and the slowing of tax revenues.

Specifically, the  budget reductions reflect a five percent cut across-the-board spending roll back in all city agencies including ones deemed essential like sanitation, education, and the police. The trimmed spending plan relies on the cancellation of five new police classes that will result in the NYPD dropping below 30,000 for the first time since the 1990s.

According to the education news website Chalkbeat, the city’s public school system could face a $2.1 billion hit that would include a $120 million reduction for its Universal Pre-K program. 

"These are unnecessary budget cuts to our public schools,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the UFT, the city’s largest public union. “They are driven by City Hall's false political narrative that New York City is about to fall off a fiscal cliff.  Revenues are higher than expected, investment from Albany is up, and reserves are at a near-record high.”

Mulgrew continued, “Rather than protect our public schools, City Hall proposes to cut overall funding, and on top of that, is making good on another threat by clawing back $109 million from city classrooms. That means 653 schools – 43 percent  of the school system - will be hit now with midyear budget cuts. Class sizes will rise, and school communities will be needlessly damaged.”

‘BLUNT’ FORCE FISCAL TRAUMA 

A joint statement from City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Finance Chair Justin Brannan conceded the city had “serious forthcoming gaps” due to the “expiration of federal COVID stimulus funds, economic impacts of the pandemic” as well as “additional spending” on an increased number of asylum seekers.” But the Council leaders added that the “Administration’s response in providing services for asylum seekers has relied far too much on expensive emergency contracts with for-profit companies that cost the City billions of dollars.”

The statement continued, “The Administration’s approach of reducing budgets of all agencies broadly through additional cuts and a hiring freeze, along with inflicting cuts on our libraries, CUNY, and cultural institutions, is too blunt and not the prudent or sole choice. With clear evidence that city agencies are lagging in their ability to provide New Yorkers with necessary benefits and services at historic levels, the Administration must prioritize real exemptions from cuts to turn around city agency performance issues.”

Council Member  Shekar Krishnan (D-Queens), chair of the Council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation, says New York City cannot cut its way to prosperity.

“Mayor Adams is shrinking our public services and public spaces at the exact moment that New Yorkers most need them,” Krishnan said in a statement. “With growing public school enrollment and thousands of new immigrant families, he is cutting school budgets, pre-K seats, and library hours. In the wake of a summer of lifeguard shortages and drowning deaths, he is cutting free swim classes. In the face of real challenges, New Yorkers deserve real investments in our communities. We deserve much better than a bleak vision for our great city.”

In recent years, it’s been up to the New York City Council, during the so-called budget dance with the Mayor to restore some cuts to education as well as to the public libraries and community-based cultural and social service non-profits. That will be much harder, if not impossible this budget cycle because of the deep cuts to basic services like police, fire, and sanitation.  

FEWER COPS=SLOWER RESPONSE TIMES

In 2022, over 1,200 cops resigned before having five years on the job, with another 2,000 retiring, the largest exodus since November 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, according to the New York Times. Dozens of members of the NYPD died as a consequence of their occupational exposure to COVID during the pandemic. All of the department’s employees were subject to a controversial vaccine mandate which is still the subject of ongoing litigation.

At a Nov. 8 press conference where Mayor Adams told reporters he would break with tradition and not attend SOMOS, the annual political retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico convened by New York State Legislature’s Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force, the former police captain presaged this week’s “frightening” budget cuts, saying they were “going to break our hearts.”

The cuts to the NYPD come several weeks after City Hall reported a 5.6 percent drop in overall crime, along with an almost 30 percent drop in murders and a 27 percent reduction in burglaries. Robberies, rapes, and larcenies were also down.  

However, the recent success on the crime reduction comes as the latest Mayor’s Management Report documented significant increase in response times as call volume continued to climb, two troubling trends that are each “at a five-year high.” The administration attributed the 15 percent increase in the average response times to all crimes to “higher levels of traffic and increased workload” as total 911 call volume spiked “by 11 percent as compared to Fiscal 2022.”

“This is truly a disaster for every New Yorker who cares about safe streets,” PBA President Patrick Hendry in a statement. “Cops are already stretched to our breaking point, and these cuts will return us to staffing levels we haven’t seen since the crime epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s. We cannot go back there. We need every level of government to work together to find a way to support police officers and protect New York City’s thirty years of public safety progress.”

Several non-law enforcement union presidents told Work-Bites that the reductions in the NYPD workforce would have ramifications well beyond crime control and would accelerate the erosion of response times to life threatening fire and EMS calls.

RIPPLE EFFECT

“Any cut to the NYPD that reduces the number of police affects all New York’s  first responders,” texted FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Brosi, president of the UFOA. “If violent crime increases so does the medical runs for EMS and fire units — this has a dramatic impact on an already strained service — If people feel less safe due to the lack of police that can have a rippling effect on tourism and spending which will further impact the budget and potentially lead to more cuts.”

Vincent Variale, president of DC 37’s Local 3621, which represent FDNY EMS officers, said “These NYPD cuts will affect the safety for our members and cuts to FDNY EMS will effect response times, which have already started to increase. People will die because the City continues to have a poorly funded and broken EMS system.”

The city’s own data supports Brosi’s and Variale’s concerns.

According to the latest Mayor’s Management Report for only the second time since the FDNY absorbed the city’s EMS workforce in 1996, the average response time for a city ambulance to answer a life-threatening emergency exceeded ten minutes. At 10:43, that response time was 36 seconds longer than the previous year, according to the Mayor’s Management Report [MMR] looking at fiscal year 2023 — and a 1:21 longer than what was reported four years ago.

“The American Heart Association's scientific position is that brain death and permanent death start to occur in 4–6 minutes after someone experiences cardiac arrest,” reports EMS World. “Cardiac arrest can be reversible if treated within a few minutes with an electric shock and ALS [advanced life support] intervention to restore a normal heartbeat. Verifying this standard are studies showing that a victim's chances of survival are reduced by 7 percent to 10 percent with every minute that passes without defibrillation and advanced life support intervention. Few attempts at resuscitation succeed after 10 minutes.”

“Well, these numbers show a very disturbing trend that if firefighters and EMS take longer to get to patients the survivability drops dramatically,” Uniformed Firefighter Association President Andy Ansbro told Work-Bites earlier this year when the new response data was released. “Five years ago, you had a 25 percent better chance of surviving a heart attack than you do today and that is due entirely to the city’s inability to control traffic and also keep units available due to the increased workload we have. These numbers are shocking.”

Joe Puleo is president of DC 37’s Local 983 which represents thousands of blue collar workers in a myriad of civil service titles ranging from the Urban Park Rangers for the Department of Parks to Motor Vehicle Operators working across dozens of city agencies.

“The fewer police out there the longer it will take for our Urban Park Rangers to get back-up from the NYPD when they are trying to perform enforcement within the city’s parks,” Puleo told Work-Bites. Puleo added that increasingly his members in code enforcement for the Parks Department were moving over to maintenance because those title pay more. “They figure why take that additional risk,” he said.

TRICKLE DOWN?

“The City's budget situation, driven entirely by the asylum seeker crisis, cries out for federal and state fiscal aid,” wrote James Parrott, director of Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. “The State absolutely must do more to help the City, especially considering that the State is sitting on $22 billion in reserves, with a good chunk of that what can only be considered ‘excess reserves.’  After all, most of those reserves stem from State tax collections generated by NYC's economy.”

The Citizens Budget Commission, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank said the Adams November budget revisions delivered “some needed savings through the first round of budget reductions, much more needs to be done to close the massive remaining gaps and stave off a fiscal reckoning.”

The CBC  statement continued, “Services will be best preserved if the City works with labor, making changes as needed to work rules and job titles, with a focus on maintaining high-quality critical services while reducing costs. These efficiencies are necessary.”

CBC, whose board includes top executives from corporations like Wells Fargo and Citibank, also called for additional funds to come from the federal government and Albany to cover the costs of the migrant crisis that it said  continued “to drive a significant portion of the budget gaps.” 

HELPING THOSE THAT HELP THEMSELVES?

James Henry is an attorney and  co-founder of the Tax Justice Network as well as Global Justice Fellow and faculty member at Yale University. Henry told Work-Bites that New York State already has a possible fiscal remedy  on the books since 1905 when under a Republican governor Albany enacted a five cent per $100 Stock Transfer Tax that since the early 1980s Albany has inexplicably been rebating back to Wall Street.

“For all practical purposes Washington is out of commission,” Henry said, observing that the House of Representatives does not even have a consensus who won the 2020 Presidential election. “London has had this on the books since 1698 and it would generate $15 to $20 billion a year and most of the tax is paid by non-New Yorkers — its progressive and the people paying it are at the very top of the income ladder.”

Back in 2020, while Trump was still in office and both New York State and New York City  were in need of tens of billions of dollars in federal pandemic aid that was not forthcoming, Assembly Member Phil Steck (D-NY) introduced legislation to end the Albany practices of handing back the proceeds of the Stock Transfer Tax to Wall Street which continued to rake in record profits.

“The tax is in sum and substance one quarter of one percent, it's nothing,” Steck said in 2020 in a phone interview. "In the last ten years, we have given up $138 billion. It is the classic race to the bottom. The whole public sector has been starved. It all starts with Reagan and the anti-tax thing and the idea that government is bloated yet huge private corporations have as much bureaucracy as government.”

“We need to do something because you can’t let public services slide like this otherwise it will be just like the 1970s,” Puleo, president of DC 37 Local 983 said.

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